Michael’s evocative images from his series, Lakeside Sketches and the Sound of Light, were taken on his summer trips home to Lake Hurron in Canada. He wanted to capture a pictorialist sensibility, and worked on different darkroom techniques until he created a quality that felt “suspended in time. The Pictorialists believed that making a photograph shouldn’t be merely the detailed recording of an external object in a certain time and place but a rendering of the appearance of reality with the artists’ subjective experience integrated into the final image. The pictorialists and their ideas excited me. Their images were often dark, moody, soft and dreamlike. I knew that this was how I saw and felt the lake.

His pictures kind of give you that feeling that you might get in a haunted place. There is a difference between his subjects and the background. I like it a lot. In a small way, his pictures almost make you feel a little humble.